The inventive subject matter pertains to communication systems and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus to provide packet protocol engines.
Communication systems receive and transmit data to support voice and data communication. Data packets are transmitted and received between nodes of the communication system. These data packets may be bundled into data frames for efficiency of transmission.
Typically, each node of the communication system employs an interrupt arrangement to drive the processing for transmission and reception of the data packets. When an interrupt occurs, basic communication system processing is temporarily stopped. The data transmission and reception operations generating the interrupt are performed for a data frame of data packets before basic communication system processing is resumed. As a result, basic processing of the communication system is slowed.